This campaign has been so exciting! I am so proud of everyone and all the work they have done! I'm especially proud of the young people and kids who are paying such close attention to this historic election and doing whatever they can to make Senator Obama our next President! I'd like to share a few short stories about some of the kids in my life that are making a difference!
My grandson turned 2 yrs old today! He doesn't talk much yet, but he says Hi, Momma, Dadda and Bama! He's been saying Bama longer than Hi! My daughter, his Mom, has an Obama calendar hanging on the wall, so, when he sees Barack on TV, he gets so excited saying "Bama" and pointing to the TV and then the calendar!
My granddaughters watch everything they can about the Senator! Then they call me, "Grandma, did you see Obama on TV?" Then they tell me what they liked about his speech or interview and ask me if I liked it. They talk to their friends, too, and if they don't support Barack, they talk to them about it and then call and tell me all about what they said to convince them that Barack is the best candidate!
My 10 yr old cousin is very convincing with her friends and their families. If they don't support Barack she says, "Do your parents make more than $250,000 a year?" Not too many say yes, but if they do she still tries to convince them to vote for Barack or tell their parents to!
My daughters attend rallies, talk to everyone they know about Barack and have done some canvassing and voter registrations!
I'd love to hear stories about your Obama Kids!
Gail/Obama in the Heart
<img src=”http://www.barackobama.com/images/email/08/oct/debatewatch3_e.jpg”>
The final presidential debate is this Wednesday, October 15th, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. It's the last chance for undecided voters to see Barack and John McCain side-by-side and determine who will bring the change this country needs. You can make the most of this opportunity by bringing your friends, family, and fellow supporters together to watch. Sign up to host a Debate Watch Party. We'll make sure you have everything you need to make the event a success. If you've hosted an event before, you know how powerful they can be to help grow our movement. If you haven't, it's a terrific way to show your support, and we'll be with you every step of the way to help. We're having a special conference call for Debate Watch Party hosts next week. We'll give you ideas for how to get your guests involved in the rest of the campaign. In these final weeks, each of us needs to do whatever we can to keep growing our movement and encourage undecided voters to cast their vote for change. Sign up to host a Debate Watch Party now: http://my.barackobama.com/debate-watch-party Thanks, Jon Jon Carson National Field Director Obama for America
A new New York Times/CBS News poll shows the Republicans' convention bounce has receded, and more people name Senator Obama as the candidate most likely to bring about change in Washington, more likely to share their values, and most likely to improve our nation's relations with foreign countries.
(Can we say a collective "I told you so"?)
Enjoy on your own: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/us/politics/19pollcnd.html?adxnnl=1&fta=y&adxnnlx=1221908420-6aZBOvBMDj2EOEqTEzx4Zw
McCain's Sexist VP Pick The GOP seems to think women will eagerly vote for any ticket that includes a member of their gender. That's Republican tokenism and pandering at its worst. Ann Friedman | August 29, 2008 | web only
Republican Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato)
John McCain's decision to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate is the perfect end to several weeks in which we saw Republicans make weak claims that theirs is the party of women's rights.
Last month, Bill Kristol was predicting that McCain would choose Palin because "Republicans are much more open to strong women." (He also decried the "horrible sexism and misogyny" Hillary Clinton faced in the Democratic primary, but somehow failed to mention his own comment during the primary that, "white women are a problem, that's, you know -- we all live with that.") As recently as last week he was railing against the "Democrats' glass ceiling." And today, FOX News was already crowing, "Looks like the glass ceiling hasn't been broken by Hillary Clinton, but by Senator McCain."
Palin's addition to the ticket takes Republican faux-feminism to a whole new level. As Adam Serwer pointed out on TAPPED, this is in fact a condescending move by the GOP. It plays to the assumption that disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters did not care about her politics -- only her gender. In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence to the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues, and merely want to vote for someone who looks like them. As Serwer noted, it's akin to choosing Alan Keyes in an attempt to compete with Obama for votes from black Americans.
I can't help but be, oh, a little bit skeptical of Republicans' sudden interest in the glass ceiling. After all, this is the party that threw women like Lilly Ledbetter under the bus, in favor of businesses that practice wage discrimination. The party that stymied the Equal Rights Amendment. The party that not only wants to force women here and abroad to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, but also wants to deny them access to a range of contraception options.
Not to mention hypocrisy at play. Republicans directed an inexcusable amount of sexist vitriol at Hillary during the primary. As Michelle Malkin said on Fox News about Hillary, "If that's the face of experience, I think it's going to scare away a lot of those independent voters that are on the fence." At National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez blamed polling that said America isn't ready for a woman president on the failure of Geena Davis' TV show (in which she played a vice president who was elevated to commander in chief after the president's death). And Kristol credited Hillary's brief, misty-eyed moment for propelling her to victory in the New Hampshire primary: "It's the tears. She pretended to cry, the women felt sorry for her, and she won."
It's clear that Republicans believe that what made Hillary Clinton such a good candidate was her gender, not her political experience or positions on the issues. And McCain's decision to pick Palin shows he took this message to heart and chose to add her to the ticket primarily because of her gender. In so doing, McCain has turned the idea of the first woman in the White House from a true moment of change to an empty pander.
Why is this a pander? Because Palin is not a woman who has a record of representing women's interests. She is beloved by extremely right-wing conservatives for her anti-choice record (fittingly, she's a member of the faux-feminist anti-choice group Feminists for Life). Palin supports federal anti-gay marriage legislation. She believes schools should teach creationism. Alaska is currently considering spending more on abstinence-only sex education. And when it comes to a slew of other issues of importance to women, such as equal pay, she's not on the record.
Of course, I'm of the belief that more women in politics -- across the ideological spectrum -- is always a good thing. On a superficial level, nominating a woman to the Republican presidential ticket is indeed a milestone. But the real reason many women were excited about Hillary Clinton's candidacy is that she was the whole package -- a politician with a solid record on issues like choice and fair pay, and with a lot of experience, who was also a woman. Even feminists I disagreed with during the primary made the compelling point that it wasn't just about Hillary's gender. It was about her record, too.
Clearly, the GOP is banking on the votes of the subset of Hillary supporters who supported her on the basis of gender alone. Much ink and airtime have been devoted to analyzing these particular Hillary supporters and their motivations, but the bulk of voters will not cast their ballots on gender alone. The GOP's strategy may very well backfire. After all, most of us understand that a woman candidate is not the same thing as a woman's candidate.
A bakery in my neighborhood is a favorite hangout and watering hole of tired, working parents. Mostly, they are single mothers raising children with home-based businesses. One manages a corporate gift business that arranges for mass gifts for salesmen, insurance agents and corporate employees. She is a sophisticated, savvy woman, who is a stay at home mom, with a day nanny who helps care for the children, while Mom works an 8 hour day. She has affordable child care, courtesy of another working parent in the household. They are doing well and seldom talks about what they cannot afford, but mostly what trips they have just been back from.
Contrast that with another mother who works during the day, who has a two year old girl who goes to a nearby Christian preschool. Her two year old daughter walks up to the bakery almost on a daily basis and gets a free olive roll from one of the owners or the frontdesk cashier, the owner's daughter. She seldom buys a croissant or coffee, and when she does, she usually pays with coins that she meticulously counts on the counter, the same way I do sometimes towards the end of the month, when dollars become scarce.
I look at her face when she walks in, usually with a worried look. And when she shares, it is about her plans to move out, to look for a job, to provide a living for her daughter. On days that she is well dressed, sporting heels, tightly belted dress and with red colored lips, I wonder what her day would be like. Is she a model, I wonder?
She is worried that she cannot afford to provide for her child. Occasionally, the child's father stops by and he carries her to the bakery counter and he buys her an occasional cookie, but mostly, it is the single young mother who carries her daughter from the preschool to the doorsteps of the bakery.
I feel for her and wish a new economy would make it easier for her to have free child care and for her to find work earning livable wages, and if without current skills, a job center that can train her to be part of the techonologically savvy 21st century working world.
I imagine her to be one of the working women for whom Obama's economic plan is directed at. For she is the kind of working woman who can use help in raising Sadie, a quiet, reserved 2 year old with soft curls in her hair.
Another single mother walked into the bakery today and her son just turned 1 today. She too is worried about the economy, she worries that she may not make it. I suggested that even as her child is only 1, it pays to set aside even $25 for college and by the time he is 18, he would have a college fund. She agreed.
She has a business teaching special needs children muscle use and coordination to stimulate muscle memory and ultimately, stimulating the brains. She too can use some help with child care, as she is raising her son without another parent at home and she can use an occasional reprieve to even just do groceries on her own, without worrying about caring for her son.
It gets me imagining if we had a federally funded child care, in facilities updated with geothermal systems for air cooling and heating, a nutritionist that plans the meals of these children, a child care specialist who know the developmental needs of their children, and enough caregivers that attend to these small children while these mothers at work, would it enhance these three mothers' lives?
I also imagine a chef dedicated to preparing meals for the staff and during the evenings, a balanced meal prepared for the working parents, at a subsidized rate. Would this work for our working families and improve their quality of life? After they get home, all they have to do is play with their young children, give them baths, read them books, and then put them to bed. In the morning, they are not rushing to feed their children, for their children will be fed hot breakfasts at this federally funded child care, and they can simply grab a quick cereal bar, coffee and off to work they go.
Would this not help them improve the quality of their lives? It just might, and running this center would not cost the federal government $10 billion a month, if researching any child care center in operation, they operate on a measly thin budget of $500,000 a year and for that, they serve 50 children or so. And if they are equipped with other ancillary staff: nutritionist, chef, and more aides, another $250,000 in operational costs.
A small drop in the bucket to ease the lives of young single mothers who are enterpreneurs in the neighborhood, and costing us mere less 1/1000 of 1% of what we are using now to fund the war in Iraq.
Just imagine what we can use the $10 billion a month we are using now for the war in Iraq to help working families. Senator Barack Obama is right, our economy is in dire condition now, as it is focused on spending on projects in the deserts of Iraq, when Iraq has over 80 billion dollars in reserve, and no federal reserves exist for our working families who wear the worries on their faces, looking for ways to provide for their children, and shouldering the double burdens of child care, as well as economic care of their families and hardly any time for caring for their personal selves, yet are funding this war expenditure at $10 billion a month. What are we going to do this November?
Will we vote for change and assist our working single mothers? Or will we maintain the $10 billion expenditure each month in the war in Iraq?
Would we vote for the status quo as Exxon rakes in another 40% increase in profit each quarter in the billions? Would you vote to remove the worry on the faces of these young, single mothers in America? They used to have big American dreams, let us vote so they can have their American dreams actualized, instead of the wrinkles and worries on their faces.
I have come home from a long stay in Mexico to find - because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar. When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as “Miss” when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would.
My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.
We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn’t pay it to a nigger. That before she’d pay a nigger that much money she’d milk the dairy cows herself.
When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that “Jane” and “Dick” had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter.
The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had had no idea - so kept from black people it had been - that such a place existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their “democratic” right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.
I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.
I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans -black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.
When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.
True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth’s people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.
I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don’t understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, “enemy” or “friend,” and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?
It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as “a woman” while Barack Obama is always referred to as “a black man.” One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others’ lives that has so marred our country’s contacts with the rest of the world.
And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces’ case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families - and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes - we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.
When I offered the word “Womanism” many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.
Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.
We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Namaste;
And with all my love,
Alice Walker Cazul Northern California First Day of Spring
AWESOME INTERVIEW OF BARACK AND MICHELLE OBAMA
Picture: http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2008/features/magstories/080804/barack_obama4.jpg
Link to Exclusive People Magazine Interview with Barack and Michelle Obama about Family:
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20214569_1,00.html
I am, in my everyday life, a ceramic, metal and fiber artist. I have enjoyed finding ways to combine my interests (making shawl pins in bronze with ceramic accent beads, for example) in new and challenging ways. Recently, I began using my miniature potter's wheel to make wheel thrown spindle whorls for spinning. Once thrown, the whorls are decorated with carving and then fired/glazed/fired again before being placed on a shaft. So, what does this have to do with Obama?
June 12, 2008 2:43 PM
At a town hall meeting in Kaukauna, Wisc., Thursday afternoon, amidst questions about health care and the economy, a young man said he had a question for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and Obama should "please be as intellectual or spiritual as you would like."
"Well this is a lot of pressure," Obama said to laugher.
"My question is: what does life mean to you?" the young man asked.
"Oh goodness," Obama said, a bit taken aback. "What does life mean to me?"
He stammered a bit as he contemplated the enormity of the query.
"Well, uh, I, uh…"
The crowd of 2,500 supporters at Kaukauna High School * laughed with apparent sympathy.
"I don't know where to start on a question like that," Obama said. "Let me just say a couple things. Right now what I think about most is my daughters who are 10 and 7," he said, referring to his daughters Malia and Sasha. "And not that I'm biased but they are perfect in all ways."
To the young man who asked the question, Obama said, "when I was your age, I thought life was all about me. And how do make my way in the world and how do I become successful and how do I get the things that I want. And right now life for me revolves around those two girls. And I think about what kind of a place am I leaving them."
And with that, came the able pivot.
"Michelle and I have been incredibly blessed," Obama said. "As long as God's looking over, my girls are going to be OK." They go to "great schools, will be able to afford college, are in good health and will be well cared for if they ever get sick.
But the country and the world they're living in, Obama said, needs work.
"Are they living in a county where there’s a huge gap between a few who are wealthy and a whole bunch of people who are struggling every day?" Obama asked. "Are they living in a county that is still divided by race?
"Are they living in a country where because they’re girls they don’t have as much opportunity as boys do?
"Are they living in a country where we are hated around the world because we don’t cooperate with other countries as effectively as we should? Are they living in a country where they are threatened by terrorism and a nuclear explosion could happen in a major American city? Are they living in a country in which because of a lack of sensible energy we are not only ransoming our future, but we’re also threatening the very livelihood of the planet?"
Obama continued, "what life means to me is that every day I wake up trying to figure out how can I secure their futures and the futures of all children, ...How can I make sure that we are giving a planet and a country to them that is better than the one we got? And, you know ,so I guess what I’ve discovered is that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re somehow giving yourself to something larger to yourself. And that’s part of my Christian faith. It’s also part of the reason I am running for president of the United States."
So.
That's what life means to him. In case you were wondering.
- jpt in Kaukauna, Wisc.
**
* Kaukauna High School Ghost Spirit Song:
Hail KaukuanaHail to TheeWe Thy Loyal Sons Shall BeFighting for the Orange and BlackIn Future YearsYou'll See Us Back
See The Laurels She Has WonThrough Every Good and Faithful SonHer Courageous, Valiant StudentsMarch On to "Victory"!!
When I was pregnant, or maybe it was when Sprout was an infant, I remember reading an article on playgroup politics in one of the many parenting magazines that found their way into my hands. The part of the article that made the biggest impression for me was the author's assertion that, as parents, we should get used to the idea that we were no longer in a position to choose our own friends. The author asserted that, from the moment our children begin interacting with other children, a parent's social life is transformed to play dates and kid-friendly activites with the parents/families of our children's friends.
Never underestimate the power of a postive message to change minds. Hope springs anew!
http://www.truthout.org/article/former-bush-donors-now-giving-obama
Don't let the pundits get you down. Mark Mellman, in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, reports today that Obama is doing better with the "working class" electorate than either Al Gore or John Kerry was at this same point in those elections.
Read this, and take it to the superdelegates.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinion/29mellman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
My husband sent me a link, passed on to him by the group Science Fiction Fans for Obama, to a campaign fundraiser from artist Michael Cuffe. He's selling signed "Halo-bama" stickers, limited in number to 1000, for $2.50, with half the proceeds going to the Obama campaign.
Take a gander at a fun sticker for a great cause!
http://www.theobamaexperiment.com/Home.html
Spread the word!
Obama campaign says no protest!
If they don't want people to protest, then don't. We need to stay positive and on-message. Yelling at Hillary's supporters will torpedo that. Stay positive, act locally, help out the voter reg drive if you're there, and remember that Obama's people know what they're doing!
By Kim Chipman
May 25 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama, standing in for Senator Edward M. Kennedy as commencement speaker at Wesleyan University, invoked the Kennedy family's legacy of public service and challenged students to look beyond material gains and work for our ``collective salvation.''
``No one is forcing you to care,'' Obama said. ``You can take your diploma, walk off this stage and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy. But I hope you don't.''
With a commanding lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama said that if he is elected he will call upon the students and the nation to ``be unified in service to a greater good. I intend to make it a cause of my presidency.''
Wesleyan officials estimated the crowd at 25,000, including those who viewed the speech on closed-circuit television in rooms around the campus set up to handle the overflow. Last year, 8,000 attended the college's 175th anniversary celebration.
Obama pinch-hit for Kennedy at the Middletown, Connecticut, school after the 76-year-old Democratic Party lion was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Kennedy, along with his niece, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, endorsed Obama in January, a symbolic ``passing of the torch'' to the Illinois senator.
`Not Done Yet'
``It is rare in this country of ours that a person exists who has touched the lives of nearly every single American without many of us even realizing it,'' Obama said in tribute to his cancer-stricken Senate colleague from Massachusetts. ``And I have a feeling that Ted Kennedy is not done just yet.''
Obama said the students should draw inspiration from Kennedy and devote their energies to the common good.
``It's because you have an obligation to yourself,'' Obama, 46, said. ``Because our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation.''
Among the Wesleyan graduates today is Kennedy's stepdaughter, Caroline Raclin. The commencement also marks the 25th reunion for Kennedy's son, Edward Kennedy Jr., who graduated from the school in 1983.
Recalling his time as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama said there are many ways the students can help others.
``At a time of war, we need you to work for peace,'' he said. ``At a time of inequality, we need you to work for opportunity. At a time of so much cynicism and so much doubt, we need you to make us believe again.''
`Childhood Adrift'
He reminded the audience he was raised by a single mother and his grandparents, living overseas and in Honolulu, after his Kenyan father left when he was 2-years-old. ``I spent much of my childhood adrift,'' said Obama, who lived in Indonesia during much of his time in elementary school.
After graduating from Columbia University in New York, he said his decision to take a $12,000-a-year job as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side changed his life. ``Through service, I discovered how my own improbable story fit into the larger story of America,'' he said.
Obama also referred to his father's roots by noting that two graduating Wesleyan students plan to go to Kenya to help bring alternative sources of energy to poverty-ridden areas.
He told the graduating class that the world they are entering will need a ``generation of volunteers' to work on renewable energy projects as governments battle global climate change. He also stressed the need for more people to act as academic mentors to children and donate their time to high-need areas such as New Orleans or a local homeless shelter.
Wesleyan Graduates
Today's appearance gives Obama more exposure to a network of wealthy, high-profile Wesleyan graduates, including Sun Microsystems Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Schwartz, former Southwest Airlines Co. Chairman Herb Kelleher, ``The West Wing'' television show actor Bradley Whitford and New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.
Kennedy has served in the Senate since 1962, making him the second-longest-serving current lawmaker in the chamber after Senator Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat.
In 1984 he received an honorary degree from Wesleyan, a school of 2,700 students that is sometimes confused with Wellesley College, New York Senator Hillary Clinton's alma mater, or Ohio Wesleyan University.
Kennedy wasn't present at today's graduation ceremony. His wife, Vicki, did attend.
Wesleyan is tied for 11th place on U.S. News & World Report's ranking of top American liberal arts colleges.
Obama, who graduated from Columbia University in New York and obtained a law degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had no previous ties to Wesleyan. Today he received an honorary degree of laws from the school.
To contact the reporter on this story: Kim Chipman in Middletown, Connecticut at kchipman@bloomberg.net.
She was born in Russia, fled the pogroms with her family, was raised in Milwaukee, and worked the counter at her father's general store when she was 8. In early adulthood she made aliyah to Palestine, where she worked on a kibbutz, picking almonds and chasing chickens. She rose in politics, was the first woman in the first Israeli cabinet, soldiered on through war and rumors of war, became the first and so far only woman to be prime minister of Israel. And she knew what it is to be a woman in the world. "At work, you think of the children you've left at home. At home you think of the work you've left unfinished. . . . Your heart is rent." This of course was Golda Meir.
Another: She was born in a family at war with itself and the reigning power outside. As a child she carried word from her important father to his fellow revolutionaries, smuggling the papers in her school bag. War and rumors of war, arrests, eight months in jail. A rise in politics -- administering refugee camps, government minister. When war came, she refused to flee an insecure border area; her stubbornness helped rally a nation. Her rivals sometimes called her "Dumb Doll," and an American president is said to have referred to her in private as "the old witch." But the prime minister of India preferred grounding her foes to dust to complaining about gender bias. In the end, and in the way of things, she was ground up too. Proud woman, Indira Gandhi.
And there is Margaret Hilda Roberts. A childhood in the besieged Britain of World War II -- she told me once of listening to the wireless and being roused by Churchill. "Westward look, the land is bright," she quoted him; she knew every stanza of the old poem. Her father, too, was a shopkeeper, and she grew up in the apartment above the store near the tracks. She went to Oxford on scholarship, worked as a chemist, entered politics, rose, became another first and only, succeeding not only in a man's world but in a class system in which they knew how to take care of ambitious little grocer's daughters from Grantham. She was to a degree an outsider within her own party, so she remade it. She lived for ideas as her colleagues lived for comfort and complaint. The Tories those days managed loss. She wanted to stop it; she wanted gain. Just before she became prime minister, the Soviets, thinking they were deftly stigmatizing an upstart, labeled her the Iron Lady. She seized the insult and wore it like a hat. This was Thatcher, stupendous Thatcher, now the baroness.
Great women, all different, but great in terms of size, of impact on the world and of struggles overcome. Struggle was not something they read about in a book. They did not use guilt to win election -- it comes up zero if you Google "Thatcher" and "You're just picking on me because I'm a woman." Instead they used the appeals men used: stronger leadership, better ideas, a superior philosophy.
* * *
You know where I'm going, for you know where she went. Hillary Clinton complained again this week that sexism has been a major dynamic in her unsuccessful bid for political dominance. She is quoted by the Washington Post's Lois Romano decrying the "sexist" treatment she received during the campaign, and the "incredible vitriol that has been engendered" by those who are "nothing but misogynists." The New York Times reported she told sympathetic bloggers in a conference call that she is saddened by the "mean-spiritedness and terrible insults" that have been thrown "at you, for supporting me, and at women in general."
Where to begin? One wants to be sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton at this point, if for no other reason than to show one's range. But her last weeks have been, and her next weeks will likely be, one long exercise in summoning further denunciations. It is something new in politics, the How Else Can I Offend You Tour. And I suppose it is aimed not at voters -- you don't persuade anyone by complaining in this way, you only reinforce what your supporters already think -- but at history, at the way history will tell the story of the reasons for her loss.
So, to address the charge that sexism did her in:
It is insulting, because it asserts that those who supported someone else this year were driven by low prejudice and mindless bias.
It is manipulative, because it asserts that if you want to be understood, both within the community and in the larger brotherhood of man, to be wholly without bias and prejudice, you must support Mrs. Clinton.
It is not true. Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they'd give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they'd call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they'd realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes. She should be a guy and say thanks.
It is prissy. Mrs. Clinton's supporters are now complaining about the Hillary nutcrackers sold at every airport shop. Boo hoo. If Golda Meir, a woman of not only proclaimed but actual toughness, heard about Golda nutcrackers, she would have bought them by the case and given them away as party favors.
It is sissy. It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say "Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other's bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it's like that for the boys and for the girls."
And because the charge of sexism is all of the above, it is, ultimately, undermining of the position of women. Or rather it would be if its source were not someone broadly understood by friend and foe alike to be willing to say anything to gain advantage.
It is probably truer that being a woman helped Mrs. Clinton. She was the front-runner anyway and had all the money, power, Beltway backers. But the fact that she was a woman helped give her supporters the special oomph to be gotten from making history. They were by definition involved in something historic. And they were on the right side, connected to the one making the breakthrough, shattering the glass. They were going to be part of breaking it into a million little pieces that could rain down softly during the balloon drop at the historic convention, each of them catching the glow of the lights. Some network reporter was going to say, "They look like pieces of the glass ceiling that has finally been shattered."
I know: Barf. But also: Fine. Politics should be fun.
Meir and Gandhi and Mrs. Thatcher suffered through the political downside of their sex and made the most of the upside. Fair enough. As for this week's Clinton complaints, I imagine Mrs. Thatcher would bop her on the head with her purse. Mrs. Gandhi would say "That is no way to play it." Mrs. Meir? "They said I was the only woman in the cabinet and the only one with -- well, you know. I loved it."
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
The Huffington Post has some nice quotes from the five Superdelegates endorsing Senator Obama today, one switching his support from Sen. Clinton. Watching our candidate cement this nomination is going to be a wonderful kick-off to the start of Summer. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many announce for Obama before the end of Memorial Day? Enjoy!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/23/superdelegates-shift-to-o_n_103275.html
![[Sex and the Sissy]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-BM693_oj_noo_20080522181025.jpg)
